The Evolution of Evolution: Steady Progress

Obtaining Evolution

December 4, 2000

By
Michael Hall

The last time I looked at Evolution, the hackers at Helix Code were
putting it in front of the public as an actual release for the very
first time. As a functioning mock-up, it showed a lot of promise, but
there was no way I was letting it near my mail.

Since then, we're a few preview releases down the road and it's
conceivable that if you're a GNOME fan who's curious about the
project, and you can put up with the rough patches Evolution will still
throw at you, you could probably start using it today on at least a
limited basis. I did for several days last week using the last
preview release (0.6), and played with it some more after building it
from CVS.

A quick tip, before we progress:

Because components of Evolution will still die from time to time, and
because there are a lot of processes at work on the back end of the
program, it's important to have a clean shutdown of an ailing instance
of the software. Evolution's hackers have provided a script that can
be run from the command line. It puts itself in your path at install,
so if you find Evolution misbehaving, open up an xterm and type
killev. It terminates all the program's processes. If you
don't use this, its behavior can be a bit unpredictable upon restart.

Getting and Building Evolution 0.6

A tarball of the release is available directly from the Helix
Code preview page. The page also contains some links to other
packages you'll need in addition to the base development libraries
shipped with the Helix GNOME distribution.

Binaries for a variety of distributions are available from Helix Code
via the GNOME update program, by pointing it at the Evolution preview
site instead of the main Helix Code archives. You can also get at
them via
ftp. Debian users can add the following line to
/etc/apt/sources.list to retrieve Evolution via
apt-get: